Red
by fullmoonrisin
Summary: A job goes bad and Shaw has to save Root.


Hey there! I apologize in advance for the angst, it just came to me. Anyway, I hope y'all enjoy!

* * *

The world was a flurry of colors in her vision, but there was only one that had any importance to Sameen Shaw: Red.

The color was everywhere.

The heat of it burned in her gaze as barely restrained rage was kept in check. Angry crimson seeped into the corners of her mind as she imagined a thousand different ways to tear apart the gunmen who fled her wrath. It pooled on the floor and felt sticky on her busy hands…it was on Root. The hacker laid gasping on the floor of a decrepit old warehouse and Shaw knew that there was entirely too much of that color to be remotely healthy, but damn it!

Through the fog of her determination and her focused, yet frenzied efforts, Shaw was vaguely aware of her own subconscious defiant shake of her head. Not today. She didn't spend months holed up in a Samaritan facility for this.

Root was shaking under her fingertips. Whether it was from the effort of trying to speak, pain, the beginnings of hemorrhagic shock, or a combination of all three Shaw couldn't say. Still, she found herself snapping tersely at the wounded hacker when she managed to get a word out a moment later.

"Shut up, Root!" The strange wobble in her usual strong voice was a surprise; as was the lump in her throat that she hadn't noticed until she dared to speak. Last words be damned, it's not someday yet.

At least, that was the mantra she kept repeating in her head as she worked.

The reality, and she knew this with every ounce of medical knowledge she possessed, was far more grim. Root had taken shrapnel from an exploded grenade at a distance that was close to the edge of the blast radius—just a couple more feet and she would've been home free. The resulting injuries, while not immediately fatal were proving very complicated. It seemed that for every leak Shaw patched up, another one took its place and Shaw could only do so much. Root was too weak to leave the building from their current position, and the nearest hospital was too far away.

So Shaw was left to labor under the delusion that she could save Root while she was actually watching her gradually slip away. The unfairness of it was just more redness in Shaw's eyes.

By this point the hacker was struggling for breaths and looking at her sadly through partially lidded eyes. Shaw's face fell into an oddly desperate snarl at the look of it. Still, she resigned herself to only the basic attempts to stave off the inevitable for a bit longer and only half-heartedly protested when Root attempted to speak again.

Where the assassin had expected words, she was instead met with the soft touch of shaky fingers on her busy arm. Shaw stilled, meeting Root's half-lidded eyes with surprise in her own. Those eyes. Even drooping shut and slowly losing their spark, they were everything she'd come to associate with this woman in one simple gaze: the wry glint as she prodded at Shaw's defenses, cold determination in the heat of a gun fight, unconditional acceptance of her boundaries…the promise of a maybe someday that Shaw secretly thought didn't sound so bad.

Shaw's heart constricted uncomfortably inside her chest in a way that she wasn't used to. She felt she was being mocked with what little feelings she had in these last moments. "She says I'm not…I'm not gonna make it."

The sad, accepting smile on Root's face was too much for Shaw to bear and she felt her heart hammering inside her chest as angry pants of air left her nose.

"Bullshit." She snarled, glaring down at Root like a petulant child; stubborn enough to be defiant, but smart enough to know it was useless. That damn machine brought them here and hung their asses out to dry in the first place. It had failed to see that they were headed into a trap, and it had failed to give them the warning they needed to be able to protect themselves properly. The whole situation was bullshit and in her anger, Shaw had little problem placing the blame squarely at the feet of Harold Finch's AI.

The anger and resentment the assassin felt stewed in the pit of her gut as she watched Root gradually fade further away. It spread like some metastasizing cancer through her body, her extremeties, and almost physically pained her while she took in the sight of that accepting smile still perched on Root's face.

She took a calming breath and let it out in a deep, frustrated sigh, her mouth opening and closing tentatively before she finally trusted herself to speak. Her hand instinctively made its way to the hacker's tresses, stroking in a soothing motion that seemed more for her own sake. Root appeared almost at peace, and somewhere in her mind Shaw knew why.

"So, uh, I guess someday came a little early."

The serene smirk perched on Root's lips widened into a grin at that. Someday had in fact began almost the moment Sameen had returned from Samaritan clutches. What this was, she wasn't sure, but she did know there was no way she'd rather leave this cold world. It was an ironic thought considering the warmth she was feeling. She felt her body shift so she was half laying in Shaw's lap and could feel the pressure of Shaw's chin against her head. Root didn't have the strength to return the gesture in any way so she simply dwelled on the feeling; focused on the way Sameen's warmth enveloped her so completely.

"No one I'd rather be with…" Shaw heard rasped against her collar bone. She tilted her head and laid a peck to Root's crown in response before continuing with her pattern of stroking Root's hair. They sat that way for moments that felt like eons, yet somehow weren't long enough, but eventually Shaw could feel Root's body growing slacker in her arms.

Root managed to utter three final words before she faded completely from consciousness and from life; words that Shaw had been indifferent to at one point in her life, but now they stung as keenly as any bullet. The pain was brief, lasting only as long as it took to watch the light fade completely from the hacker's eyes and as she allowed herself to slump back against the wall she gave a tired sigh looking up at the unforgiving fluorescent lights in the rafters.

She couldn't feel a thing.

She had expected to be angry if something ever happened to Root, and she was, but it all seemed to vanish the moment Root's eyes went dead. Suddenly she was a kid again being pulled from the wreckage of the accident that killed her father, except now she felt like Root had taken some important piece of her when she bled out on the floor and left nothing but an empty void in its wake.

She couldn't be sure how long she'd been sitting there in her stupor, but finally the frantic chirping of the earwig in her right ear registered. Probably Finch. She put her finger to the button and listened to a relieved expression of concern from the man with passive interest, her eye still firmly fixed on Root's corpse. In her mind she was mentally reshuffling her list, placing the guys responsible for this firmly at the top. There would be hell to pay.

Her lip twitch slightly into a suggestion of a smirk that had no real emotion behind it as Finch finished questioning her.

"Yeah, Finch. I'm alright."


End file.
